


The Mother of A Moon-Eyed Boy

by LockedBox



Series: The Moon-Eyed Prince [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Gen, I think you all know how it will end, In which Zuko is blessed by the Moon Spirit and the Sun loves him just as fiercely anyway, Motherhood, Ozai (Avatar) is as good a husband as he is a parent, Pre-Canon, TW for spousal abuse, Ursa tries her best to save both her children, Ursa-centric, Zuko was lucky to be born but his troubles didn’t end there, but in the end she’s as lost and alone as they are, ignoring the comic canon because fuck the comics, see: Ozai (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:08:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26575015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LockedBox/pseuds/LockedBox
Summary: When Zuko was born, he did not cry, so Ursa wept for him instead.His father would sooner light his pyre than pray for him, so she prays instead but Agni does not answer.She has given up too much to sacrifice this one piece of happiness she has made for herself.So she prays, and even if its treason, she finds someone who will hear her prayers.
Relationships: Azula & Ursa (Avatar), Ozai/Ursa (Avatar), Ursa & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Moon-Eyed Prince [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951285
Comments: 7
Kudos: 243





	The Mother of A Moon-Eyed Boy

The timing of Ursa’s pregnancy had been considered an ill omen. Even the latest estimates of the unborn child’s arrival were only in the earliest grasps of spring, when frost clung to windows and the cherry blossoms had yet to open their blossoms to the sun.

Ursa found the concept galling.

She had learned the ways of womanhood from her mother, as all woman learned. At first the nature of the cycles, of the ways to soothe the pain, to predict their coming and going, to recognize when something was wrong and something was not. Then, when she was older, she learned the things needed to become a mother, the ways in which her bodies cycles came and went like the tide, how to know when her body was ready, and when it was not, and all that would come from that which came after.

She had left Ikem behind, and her dreams of happy, laughing children with gap toothed smiles and skinned knees with him.

Ozai appointed her tutors. Stern women with painted faces, sterner men with knitted brows, to teach her the ways of court. It was like being the Dragon Empress, all over again, wearing a mask everyone pretended was her face, since that was just how these things were done.

When she treated it like that, a mask to wear, a part to play, it became easier.

She learned the way to pour tea, the ways to walk, to speak, and not speak, she learned to arrange flowers.

Most days, she would make arrangements in white, and set them by her bedside. She favours Hydrangeas, bleached white by poor sandy soils, framed by lilies and camellias. When the time was right, she tucked a few red fire lilies, or a stem of red, twisting cherry oak, into the arrangement, and Ozai would know to come and perform his marital duties.

Yet, it was still her that they looked at with apprehension, as if she was the one who had control.

Winter children are weak firebenders, they said, if they bend at all, and Ozai creased his brow, in that ever so slight way that means he agrees, but to validate that is to admit weakness, so he says nothing at all.

Ursa says nothing, because what was there to say? If Ozai hadn’t wanted a winter child, then well, he shouldn’t have fucked her in the spring then! It wasn’t as if he seemed to enjoy it. He fucked like he sealed paperwork, like it was a duty unworthy of his time or attention.

She had played by his rules, had done everything, absolutely everything he had asked of her, become everything they expected of her, and not even that was enough. Not even her child, their child, the one tiny piece of happiness she made for herself, selfish as she was, is enough.

They keep changing the script, she doesn’t know the lines and for the first time, it sinks in how alone and how scared she is.

But she’s not alone anymore. So she improvises, as best she can. The child must be born in the first clutches of spring, and she hopes that it will be enough to soothe them.

But then the script changes again.

* * *

She begins to spot at six months. It’s only a little at first, not enough to worry about, the body often spots a bit when undergoing such drastic changes, but, after a week she begins to worry at the consistency.

She speaks to the physician. He is a competent man, war hardened and wise, but his mother never passed on that secret woman’s knowledge to him. He can mend bone and suture flesh better than any, but of this women’s wound, he knows only dry pages, not of intuition and feeling. He listens to her quietly, then consults his books, then tells Ursa to rest in bed and drink nourishing black broth and willow tea.

It gets worse. She knows it is getting worse, but they do not listen to that which they cannot see and measure. At seven months she knows the baby is not growing as it should. She knows it in her bones, but they listen only to their measurements.

Ursa wants to scream, and shout, and beg, because they listen, but they don’t hear her, but none of her Mother’s lessons prepared her for this, prepared her to feel a child grow, its heart beat, and then to lose it before she can hold them in her arms and know the colour of their eyes.

A part of her knows the physicians are doing all they can. Part of her knows not even her Mothers secret woman’s knowledge could tell her what to do now. But she can’t admit that to herself because it all feels too much like giving up.

Zuko is born two weeks later, beneath the gentle light of a full winters moon.

He does not cry.

* * *

The physician face gives away no trace of sadness, of gentleness, not like the midwife, whose eyes shine with sad understanding as he gathers the silent baby up. He holds her baby across the length of his forearm, clears the mucus from his tiny mouth with his pinky finger, and then strikes them between the shoulders. The dangling limbs twitch, and Ursa cannot bear to hope, but he does not cry. The physician frowns, and using two fingers he traces the lines of their tiny shoulders, feeling for something only he can detect, then he strikes them again, and a third time, and Ursa wants to scream at him to stop, she can see the tiny little ribcage, each rib as delicate as fishbone, and he’s surely going to shatter every bone in the tiny body and leave her nothing left to hold, to weep over, but then, the fourth time, the little body coughs.

It is not much, but it is enough.

Her child is alive.

He smiles in triumph, and rubs their back until coughing ceases, fading to a more regular wheeze. It is a small, sick sound, but it is so beautiful, and Ursa weeps.

The physician is cold, but he is not cruel, and gently passes the baby into her outstretched arms.

“You must know that he still may not survive,” he says, and Ursa learns she has a son. He cuts his cord without fanfare and wound a fine thread around the severed end. He spoke, but already his eyes turn to his scribbled notes and arcane charts.

“See if he will suckle. If he can there may be hope.”

“And if he cannot?” she cannot help but ask, even though she knows the answer.

“Then pray.”

He leaves her with the midwife and her son’s new wet-nurse, but it is her own breast she holds her son to, her first and only act of defiance in two full years.

The wet-nurse just smiles, sadly, as she realises that he cannot.

They teach her new lessons, things her Mother had never needed to know. How to use a forked wire to lift the milk from a dish, and her son drinks a drop at a time till he is too exhausted to drink anymore. How to check if her baby still breathes without waking him from his sleep.

The sages say his spark is weak, smothered by the winter cold. She thinks them fools. Her son is strong. He fights, every day he fights to cling to this sorry hand of fate he has been dealt, even when its not enough, even when the fever takes him and the cough follows on its heels, and she weeps for him, knowing that there is no undoing what she has done.

Ozai looks at her with cold, unfeeling eyes. He looks at their son with contempt.

He would have been happier to light a funeral pyre than pray for his poor, sick child, but pray they do. It is Azulon, not him, never him, who gives out the call, asking a nation to pray to Agni for his grandchild’s health. The sages light a vigil in the palace grounds, and nobles and courtiers come from all over to play for the Firelords favour, singing songs of grief and sympathy.

They pray to Agni, but Agni does not answer.

She is the one who waits by his crib, the one to hold him through his bone shaking coughs, the one to wipe his tears and press kisses to his sallow belly just to hear the whisper of air that could be a laugh if only her boy could breathe.

Rage simmers in her like a volcano, slow and steady, as everyone gives up. Oh seldom few had ever cared at all if she was being generous, but it didn’t make it any better. The servants had brought the funeral garments out of storage already for Spirits sake. He breathed still! He fought! But Agni had forgotten him as soon as he had breathed the spark of life into his lungs, and for all the world it was like he was already dead. So she raged and clung to hope, if only because she was the last one who did.

That night the full moon rose again over the fire nation, golden orange in the smoke of the sages vigil flame. It is an ill omen, they say, because everything is nowadays. She doesn’t bother to remember why.

Zuko’s utterly entranced by it, and his tired eyes seemed to drink up the light as she held him up to the window. He’s so tired, but he stares at it as if it is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, and she realises that it probably is. In his short month of life, they haven’t dared to take him out of these walls, for fear of the chill, or for fear of shame, and perhaps they never will. It’s that realisation that plants treason in her.

Her nation had always paid allegiance to the Sun, that which breathes life into their lungs and lights fire on their breath, but her body has always paid allegiance to the Moon.

It was a silly thought, but she knew in her bones it was true. These small truths that they all ignored out of convenience or fear.

But what did she have left to be afraid of now?

So she holds up her son to the starry night, and prays to the Spirit of Moon, though she does not know its name, and begs for her boy to live.

To her shock and delight, the Zuko’s eyes open wide, and he begins to cry. Not the weak, reedy sounds he had been struggling in between coughs, but a proper, clear, full lunged scream.

The wet-nurse must have come running, as she arrives a huffing, puffing mess while she is a mess of an altogether different kind, she’s weeping on the floor, her boy hiccupping in her arms.

“Did something happen? Is he hurt?” she asks, and Ursa can’t help but laugh at the simple joy of it all.

“No, he’s hungry,” she says, and that’s all they say of this sacrilegious miracle.

So together they sit and watch on baited breath as Zuko drinks, without the dish or the wire, and only when he is sated and in his crib does Ursa collapse, whispering treasonous thanks into the night sky.

Her one small joy will live this moon blessed night, and though she’s damned them both, she’s too selfish to care.

* * *

The whispers were constant now. The sages ruffled and scrambling to make sense of the strange perversion of their omens and soothsaying. Ursa can’t deny it’s gratifying to watch them sweat in her place, though she’s not so proud as to kick at the angry nest of sandwasps they’ve become.

Zuko’s eyes had changed, beneath the moonlight. She’d been so distracted by his voice, his beautiful, beautiful voice, that she hadn’t noticed, and the eyes that had open and smiled at her the next morning had shocked her.

He had been born with his father’s eyes, golden and shining like the sun on steel. But on that morning, it was the moonlight that stared back at her, pale silvery but still warm, tinged gold not by smoke, but like a bright harvest moon. Perhaps an untrained eye would not think it unusual, but she knew it for what it was, and the tensing of Ozai’s brow told her that he knew it too. She supposed even spirits had a price.

Ozai had tried to contain it, but the whispers spread all the same, she doubted they would ever stop. She didn’t care. She had prayed and the moon had answered, the rest of them could go and rot for all she cared of their gossiping.

The physician had been an unexpected help. He answered Azulon’s summons readily, and explained unexplainable things as naturally as breathing.

“It is not unusual for eye and hair colour to change in infancy, your highness, especially in cases such as this. The infant was not yet developed as it was, and immense stress can be expressed in unusual ways. I have seen many young soldiers experiences changes in hair colour after traumatic injuries, often turning grey or white outright. I suspect the infants prolonged illness has had a similar effect,” he said, and Azulon smiled and nodded, pleased by the simplicity of his answer. Ozai was less pleased, but to speak out against his father on such a triviality was beyond the limits of even his immense pride.

The fire sages butted in, as they did, scrabbling to ride on the physician’s hem.

“The moon was stained yellow that night,” they said, as if they hadn’t decried it time and time again, “we believe it to be a sign from Agni, interceding on the childs behalf.”

Azulon was liked this answers less, for all the questions it asked but did not answer, and sent the sages away. That was the last they spoke of it.

But she could not stop thinking about it.

She was the mother of a moon-eyed child in a world prostrated to the Sun and the Sun alone. It would be kinder to take him and run, run far away from Ozai and Azulon and all the swarming, stinging creatures that lived between these walls, but she had nowhere to go.

So she loved him as best she could, as if she was the only one in the world who would, and tried not to think of how true that might be.

When the autumn returned, Ozai did too. He didn’t care that the time was not right, that the cherry oak bough was missing. Ursa shouldn’t have been surprised.

The flowers had been for her, not for him. They were just a pretty lie to help her pretend.

The Dragon Empress knew her queue, so she donned the mask again, and played her part.

* * *

Azula was born at noon, at the peak of the summer solstice, just as her father had planned. She is strong and healthy, smoke on her breath as she wailed and wailed.

Ozai smiled for her, and her alone. Months passed, but when Ursa displayed the cherry oak branch by her bedside, he saw but did not come.

He had no further need of her.

This unsteadied her, but she has mastered the masks now, and does not falter. Her children need her, now, more than ever, because the standard has just been raised and there will be no others to help share the burden of his expectations.

Azula grows like a weed, and like Zuko, everything is now a struggle, but in precisely the opposite way.

Azula sees and Azula wants, and Azula takes. She devours lessons like sweets and grows fat on hardship. She strives for perfection, and achieves it, leaving her brother choking on her smoke.

Where Zuko struggled and fought and clawed his way by, Azula conquered, leaving nought but ash in her wake.

Ursa worries herself to sleep at night.

Zuko grew too, fueled by admiration for his sisters unnatural drive and skill, but, it is not enough, it is never enough. Zuko is falling behind and his sister will not lift him up.

Something is different about Azula, and as she grows, Ursa worries that different may not be a strong enough word to define it.

Something is wrong.

Ursa tries to make her understand that there is more to the courtly ways than power. That though she is strong, with her brother to watch her back, she can be even stronger. That the quiet strengths she wants to teach her will can make her stronger too, but Azula just rolls her eyes.

“Softness is for the weak, for people who need to bow and beg for things the strong can just do!” she spits, and stalks away with far too much fury than a five year old should be able to hold.

Ursa doesn’t know what to do. She has too much of her father in her and Ursa is ashamed to say she is frightened, both for her and of her.

Zuko looks upon the masks and mistakes them for truth. Azula sees the masks, and wants them for herself.

And what Azula wants, Azula takes.

Ursa had thought she had mastered the craft, but now she realizes in horror she was only ever a novice. Azula changes faces like a chameleon changes colour, freely, and readily, like she belongs wherever she goes, and all who see her believe also.

She can’t tell her lies from her truth, can’t tell if her smile is kind or her laugh true. Azula had never smiled before. Not like this. She wonders who had taught her how to smile.

Ursa had tried so hard to make her smile, but that was one lesson Azula hadn’t cared to learn. Not from her.

Zuko needs her, now more than ever, with his sister setting the pace. She doesn’t like it, but, her boy doesn’t understand why his sister doesn’t love him like she had promised him she would. He can’t see the masks that dictate their parts to play, and she knows he won’t survive on his own.

She doesn’t like it, but what can she do? She is newlywed all over again, playing a part she doesn’t understand, but now her moon-eyed child stands beside her and looks to her for guidance, his eyes so full of love it aches, and Azula dances, making fools of the both of them, and she does not know what to do.

Then Lu Ten falls at the gates of Ba Sing Se, and suddenly she realises that she has run out of time.

She is not blind. She knows her husband’s ambition, and as he parades their daughter about like a stud ostrichhorse at the spring fete, she knows what he will ask of him, knows that he has no need of her or their moon-eyed child anymore.

Azula can survive without her. She has learned at her father’s knee, soaking up every scrap of coldness he had to teach her. She knows it will break her eventually, or maybe she will break the world, burn it all till there is nothing but azure blue, but Ursa can save her no more than she can save herself.

There was no more time.

Poison is easy to acquire, if one knows where to look. She does not even need to ask. She pokes a few holes in the baseboard and sprinkles a few crumbs about, and soon the servants lay out the poison for her. She watches, and waits, and when the palace is quiet, retrieves the bottle for herself.

She invites them to tea, an opportunity for her husband to further discuss his future with his father, she lies, and to her relief and her terror they accept.

She tries to stay away. She tries to be the mask, this one last time, but she can’t.

She goes to Zuko in the night, wakes him with kisses to his hands, his belly, listens to him laugh in confusion as he rouses.

“I woke you tonight because I want to tell you a secret, my little prince,” she whispers, and he swells in pride at being entrusted with such a thing.

“Do you remember the stories we told you, about when you were born?”

His brow creases and he sags a little, full of misplaced shame planted there by the ones supposed to love him. Spirits damn them all she wished she could take him away to anywhere, anywhere that was not here.

“I was very sick, so sick I almost died. But Grandfather asked everyone to pray for me and then I got better,” he said, that was the story they all told him. As if it was Azulon’s politicking that had saved him, not the Moon, or even Agni, and certainly not Zuko himself and his immense will to survive.

“That’s not true,” she says, and clasps his hands to her heart, “you were sick, and Azulon asked us all to pray, but that’s not what saved you Zuko. From the minute you were born, the fates were against you, but you were strong. You struggled and fought to survive no matter how hard it was, and even though we all prayed to Agni, he did not answer us.”

“But why?” he asked, and her heart breaks to heart the sorrow in his voice, at the loss of one more pretty lie.

“Because Agni couldn’t hear us. The sun is very far away you know, and there are so many prayers to him they could deafen anyone,” the lie slips easily, though it is not as pretty as she’d like. It’ll have to do.

“But even though Agni did not answer, still they prayed, because it was all we knew how to do. But then one night, there was a beautiful full moon, and when I showed it to you, you smiled, like you hadn’t in days, and I knew it would be alright. It was the moon that blessed you, not the sun, my moon-eyed boy.”

She strokes his downy hair away from his bright eyes, and Zuko looks up at her, tired and confused and full of hurt and she can’t help but worry that she’s made this so much worse than it needed to be, but she can’t stop now, there are too many unspoken truths welling up and out of her and no time, and the wrong truth could spell the end of him if she fails tomorrow, but she can’t help it.

“The sun blessed you with the strength to struggle and fight, and the moon blessed you with the ability to change. You changed from a little baby boy to a brave, loving young man, and every day I am proud to be your mother, but things are going to keep changing. And I want you to promise that no matter how much things change, you’ll remember who you are, and you’ll remember how to change without losing all the things that make you strong.”

She blinks back tears as she kisses his forehead, Zuko’s confused answering promise is lost unheard into her dressing gown.

“It’s our secret alright?” she chokes on the words, and she has to do it now, has to tear herself away or she’ll never leave again and damn the both of them.

It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done.

* * *

She sets out the tea service in the early dawn light. The pu’erh is not traditional, but it is the only blend she can be sure will disguise the poisons taste. She plays out the trappings of tradition as flawlessly as she ever has before, the picture perfect wife, and Ozai smiles as Azulon watches with boredom at the thinly veiled politicking of it all.

Azulon is no fool. He has weathered many assassination attempts, he had gone through no fewer than six tasters and countless bodyguards. She wasn’t sure what part her husband had played in any of them, but she sincerely doubted he did not make at least one attempt. Even he had to have been brash and foolish once.

But he had no taster here. No, the tea is something sacred, something so old and precious that not even Sozin could burn it away in his blazing reformation.

According to tradition, she brewed it before them above her husband’s cupped flames, in a single shared pot.

She poured three cups, and drank.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this was a thing. I hoped you liked it. It started out as a weird experiment with tense and style, and I'm not entirely sure if it worked. I know there were a lot of places I slipped back into the comfortable past tense and I couldn't iron them all out. But I guess a lot of sad weirdness is just what happened when you rewatch atla, and chase it down with Ghibli's Princess Kagura (don't do this. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea. I cried so bloody hard.) Its really cool too see this fandom re-surging after all these years, back when I first watched Alta I had no idea how good it was going to be, back then it was all about lemons and songfics. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course but its pretty amazing how much fandom and fanworks have been transformed in that time and since I have time on my hands (thanks pandemic) I felt like adding to it. I was particularly inspired by Jublis Heirloom series which and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves. If you liked this you'll like that more because its amazing and you should read it.


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